The Sum Total of My Knowledge

[kobayashi]

With the release of my latest reference article, I have reached the last of my planned series of articles for this lifetime. Every thing that I have learned from creating my four scenarios is contained within these four articles. I hope that they will be helpful to the budding novice scenario makers, who seem to be frequenting our forum increasingly.

In particula, may I draw your attention to the last article, which contains pointers implementing research. I quote from it:

It is quite common to see a scenario without any research these days, which is quite a shame as the tech-tree to me is one of the more important dimensions of the Civ2 game engine. Sometimes a half-hearted effort is made to have a few items available for research at 10% of the normal rate but this too seems to give the feeling of incompleteness.


Getting the units right from the beginning
http://www.civfanatics.com/Kobyashi/SCENAR~3.shtml

Mixing and Matching Land, Sea, and Air Unit Abilities
http://www.civfanatics.com/Kobyashi/SCENAR~2.shtml

Alternative uses for Terrain2
http://www.civfanatics.com/Kobyashi/SCENAR~1.shtml

Custom Tech-Tree Design
http://www.civfanatics.com/doc/customtree/TechTree.html

(Articles assume you have some basic scenario making knowledge)

 

[kobayashi]

p.s. I have also released my WW II collection of units.

POP QUIZ

Which two units are not from ZWK?

 

[Field Marshal Klesh]

This should be up there, cause there are some really great thoughts in these writings! Especially when one has never built a scen before. I fell victim to the unit slot issue before and had to redo everything.... had I read Kob's stuff first...


-FMK.

 

[kobayashi]

When I made Star Trek BAQ (my first scenario), I laid out all the units nicely according to their race cause I didn't know any better. After making the map and placing everything I went on to do the sound .....so I had to redo the whole thing. That's why a lot of space was wasted repeating the same sounds in the spare and extra slots when I could have just used one of the multi-slot sounds. Guess its just one of those things that everyone goes through.

 

[Alshandir]

Ive been thinking of my techs recently, and I came up with a question i havent seen answered anywhere- Does anyone know which techs take the least and which the most to research? While you could say that the late techs take longer than the early techs, that doesnt entirely answer the question. There is a significant jump at Mobile Warfare, which takes about three times longer than one of its prerequisites, Automobile. There could be a unit of measurement for tech discovery. So, for instance, you could say pottery takes 30 bulbs, whereas advanced flight takes 100. if there is an order to the length of time for tech discovery, you could break up mobile warfare by adding armored warfare to illustrate the different abilities that tanks offered offensive thrusts-first, the simple ability to throw a block of steel in harms way, second to add speed to that slab of steel to encircle defenses. you could choose not to alter the default tech line by putting armored warfare in the place of plumbing or an extra tech, or consolidate some of the early ones to make mobile warfare easy to discover, once armored warfare has been put in mobile warfare's slot. options, options, but where do i start?...

 

[kobayashi]

I have to say that I swap the tech slots around frequently and have not noticed any effect. If you have one city, I think it would take the same time to reearch construction or mobile warfare. I am of the view that it simply takes longer for each incremental advance you discover. It has to be the case as your population grows constantly and you are producing more and more research output.

If you do notice any effect, it is probably due to the hard coded effects of each advance. Some make your people less happy and reduces your research rate. Or maybe all barracks are sold and there is less operating cost and more money for research.

So you needn't worry about the time factor if you want to insert advances to represent your tank discovery arc.

 

[Peter Hook]

In cosmic principles there is a changeable increment for the reserch rate. There is no preset rate for each tech, hoever there nus b some dodgy sum for working it out...
/me researches

 

[Morten Blaabjerg]

As far as I know the research rate is determined by the cosmic variable in combination with the number of previously acquired techs. So if you do a scenario where the players have a number of cities, the program expects them to have acquired a somewhat proportiate amount of techs. So if you don't give them techs to begin with, you'll have them researching techs at a very speedy rate in the beginning. So if one wants to keep a tribe really backwards in tech development, they shouldn't have too many cities. Another workaround is to keep the number of trade arrows down in the terrains. Very few trade arrows will mean slow science. But the other aspect is more important, I think.

 

[kobayashi]

bump for greg